Favorite Feminist Sword and Sorcery/Sword and Sandal

These all sound wonderful! And I’ve only read the Tarma/Kethry series, so most of them are new to me. I will definitely check them out.

One of the themes I really liked in the Tarma/Kethry series was the sexuality. (May be some mild SPOILERS in this paragraph.) Tarma sacrificed her sexuality when she dedicated herself to the goddess. She is repeatedly described as a weapon as sexless as her sword. There are a couple of times when other people don’t understand how she can live without sex, but she never regrets her choice. Kethry, on the other hand, volunteers her childbearing services and pops out babies as fast as she can. And while Kethry was sort of donating her reproduction to her bestie Tarma, it’s also made explicit that she loves her children very much and is a great mother to them. I really liked how the two extremes of sexlessness and fecundity were contrasted, each a perfectly suitable choice.

My recommendations:

1) Anything by Tamora Pierce. You could start at the beginning with Alanna: The First Adventure, about a girl who trades places with her twin brother and cross dresses to train as a knight. That message is very much rah-rah girl-power. Personally, I prefer some of her later work such as Terrier, about a girl named Beka who becomes a police officer in a fantasy city. Women are presumed to have legal equality, but in social practice they don’t so much. For example, the slang for police officer is “the Provost’s dogs”, the slang for a police station a “kennel”. Well, some people take it one step further and call female police officers “bitches”, which really gets under their skin.

All of TP’s characters work towards their own individual dreams, whether they’re math geniuses who love reading or outdoorsy types who can’t stand being cooped up with dusty books, and fulfilling their unique destiny is a big theme. Many of her characters have sex (without being shamed for it), and they all plan ahead and use protection when they do.

2) The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold. There are the Lakewalkers, magical nomads who dedicate their lives to destroying monsters, and “farmers”, anyone without magic who generally don’t believe in the monsters. Neither side has much respect for the other. Farmers have patriarchal values. Lakewalkers are matrilineal, with no theoretical basis for gender discrimination but in practice some bias towards men as warriors, women as mothers. The main story is a romance between Dag the Lakewalker and Fawn the farmer, but it’s really a coming of age for Fawn.

There’s so many awesome social dynamics I squee over. Fawn is pregnant when the story opens, and it shows her experience with losing her virginity and being an unwed mother in a society that places value on female chastity. There are some wonderful scenes where she explores her sexuality and has her first orgasm, which is deliberately contrasted to earlier, uncomfortable experiences. There’s a funny/thoughtful scene where a man wonders how it is some girls can go through puberty without learning to masturbate, and a female friend has to explain to him that when you’re taught to think of sex as dirty and your body as shameful, you don’t go looking around in your pants. And just in general there’s a lot of consideration given to what it means to be a woman and to be a good daughter/wife/mother.

3) When Demons Walk by Patricia Briggs. PB tends to be a little hit and miss for me on the feminism front (she gets a lot right and she gets a lot wrong) but when you mentioned the conflicts of colonized subjects this one sprang to mind. The city fell to invading forces when the main character Sham was only a little girl. 15 years later, she uses her magic and her thieving skill to undermine the occupying forces wherever possible. Kerim is the leader of the occupiers, sent to integrate the city into their new empire.

The conflict between the two populations is at the heart of the story; at what point do your new overlords stop being your oppressors and start being your neighbors? And the cultural conflict is what allows the main problem to grow so large; since the invaders don’t believe in magic and scoff at the natives’ superstition, they are totally unequipped to handle it when a demon starts eating people. Kerim has to hire Sham to find the murderer that can walk through walls and disappear without a trace, even though he remains patronizingly skeptical of her abilities.

4) The Trouble with Heroes edited by Denise Little. An anthology focusing on what the great heroes were really like, from the point of view of a woman who knew them better than the historians. Many of the stories are about the Greek myths such as Hercules and Medea, but they skip all over the place.

5) The Stepsister Scheme etc. by Jim C. Hines. Fairy tale princesses – they fight crime. I really like the way the different versions of the fairy tales are played with. The Disney versions are the in-universe rumors about the main characters, the Grimm versions the “true” stories that actually happened to them. Especially with Sleeping Beauty, who makes it very clear that being raped in your sleep is not romantic. Also notable because the third book passes the Bechdel Test three ways: two woman about not a man, two POC about not a White, and two QUILTBAGs about not a straight.

Loved Tarma and Kethry–although, these days, I have to raise a cynical eyebrow at the in-universe motivation for Tarma’s asexuality. Does sexuality really make someone less impartial than any other kind of relationship? I know I’m far more biased toward my family and platonic friends than I am toward any of the guys I’ve fooled around with.

Really, really loved Ladies of Mandrigyn, and am so glad someone else mentioned it. I particularly liked Starhawk’s approach to what she thought was unrequited love: no pining, no fits of jealousy, just being a friend and moving on. That’s something I see too rarely from either sex, particularly in fiction. (Also? Sun Wolf’s love interest at the beginning is smarter, tougher, and less romantic than she seems, and she and Starhawk become friends. Which: AWESOME.) Also, I am a giant sucker for anything involving training montages, so there we are.

I’d also add Katharine Kerr’s Deverry series to this (15 volume epic though it is). Deverrian culture is strongly sexist, but the series itself is feminist, IMHO, both in the sense that it confronts the implications of that sexism and in the sense that women’s bodies and stories are central to it. One of the central premises of the original novels is the self-realization (across incarnations) of the major female protagonist (you’re dealing with a significant core cast of at least three characters), and the later novels feature an expanding cast of varied female characters. Even in the early ones, there are some pretty interesting female side characters along with the central one, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for them: they all come to different terms with the limits society places (or tries to place) on their agency.

Lynn Flewelling wrote a trilogy about a female protagonist who is raised thinking she is a boy, starting with The Bone Doll’s Twin. The first book is earnestly creepy and compelling, the second deals with the gender issues raised by the premise. The third is sort of weaker, but it ties up the story neatly.

Ellen Kushner’s Privilege of the Sword is more swashbuckly than sword-and-sorcery but it’s definitely about a strong young woman with a very bad (in a non-molesty way) uncle.

Isabel C.,

It’s been a few years since I’ve read Tarma/Kethry, but I thought the in-universe explanation for her impartiality is that she’s supposed to have no particular family as her own, but the entire clan as her family. The fact that the entire clan currently consists of one family made the distinction a little blurry.

Lackey and rape as drama…ugh. I like her books that leave it out far, far more.

Sylvia Sybil,

Ah, yeah.

I just don’t make the connection between sex and family on my own, I guess. Which says something about me.

Maria,

Seriously! And being very pragmatic, especially towards the end.

Plus, I’m generally going to give points to anything that averts the “we are both into the same guy, and therefore we must hate each other” trope. Because oh my God, do I ever hate that trope. So much.

Maria,

It’s true many of Tamora Pierce’s stories are set in cities. Some exceptions, like The Woman Who Rides Like a Man being set almost entirely in a desert village, but in general medieval-ish fantasy cities. Not sure what sub-genre that makes it though – I have trouble applying the label Urban Fantasy to it since that tends to play with a very different setting and set of tropes.

But if you like journeys through countrysides you should like the upcoming Mastiff book – it’s supposed to be Beka’s quest across the country to track down some kidnappers.

Isabel C., I forgot to add that despite my problems with Lackey (the frequent rapes in the early books and the abundance of One True Magical Love Pairings combined with at least two cases of “I’ll kill your lover to give you a reason to wangst but don’t worry you’ll get a better one later”), I do have a soft spot for her because as a mentally damaged/ill teenage girl in desperate need of female role models, I found some things in her books that did appeal a lot to me. Talia’s insecurity for example was something I could (and still can) utterly identify with. And hey, I admit it, I’m a horse-lover so the concept of a magical talking horse was nice too.

What I also liked is that Lackey has various societies in which women are (more or less) equal to men. I much prefer that over sexist settings because, as with rape, hateful patriarchy is something we see in our lives or on the news every day so I really enjoy getting away from that in my entertainment.

Alara Rogers:
It’s true that it’s entirely presented from the characters’ own POV as “the ruler must be a woman because otherwise the land will be destroyed”, but the male ruler is not a good person.
…
there’s nothing wrong with being *male*, just that there is something wrong with being *king*, in that particular country (other countries do fine with male rulers.)

Thank you for clarifying.

I remain unconvinced that it’s better for a fictional society, without our modern society’s misogynist hang ups, to exclude one gender over another from leadership roles, but I appreciate your point of view.

Maria,

See, when I think Urban Fantasy, I think of a very specific subgenre of fantasy: Anita Blake, The Dresden Files, Mercy Thompson, Sookie Stackhouse. More or less contemporary setting, film noir influences, a strong central protagonist (very likely to be female) with a traumatic past who is probably sarcastic, likely a private investigator / law enforcement, and theirs is the only or the primary POV.

I think of the defining characteristic as less about place and more about the central character; “urban” would therefore translate to “contemporary” (you could also argue it translates to “dark and gritty” by way of the film noir influences). By my definition, you could have a female cop cracking jokes while investigating vampire murders in Podunk, Nowhere and still qualify as Urban Fantasy.

The definition I heard for Sword and Sorcery is that it’s set in a distinctly different world from our own, but focuses on individual problems (as opposed to the saving the world focus of epic fantasy). That’s the definition I was working off of when I included Tamora Pierce.

But I think genre labels in general are open to many interpretations (The Dragonriders of Pern has both dragons and space ships: science fiction or fantasy?).